It's a failure to recognize the fact that the virtual window of your analogy will be smashed EVERY time.

I'm not excusing exploits that can be fixed; they should be. But I don't think individual exploits are the main issue. There will always be some available.

The kind of mass profiling now possible to the police, and google, and facebook, is not open to just anybody. That's why google and facebook are valued at billions of dollars - because they're so pervasive they can create the Total Profile. And when they exploit a loophole or bug, it affects a huge percentage of the entire Internet. There are only a few such "information utilities," so they can be held to standards. At the very least, they can be tried in the court of public opinion against their pledge to "do no evil." They're advertising companies. Public relations matter greatly to them.

I disagree. A culture of, "if you are able to do it, it must be fine" is flawed at a very basic level. It's a failure to recognize anything above the law of the jungle. Property law gives us the freedom to have windows in our homes, even though, technically, they're easy to smash. Envelopes are easy to open an copper pairs are easy to tap, yet the laws that preclude this have been very effective - not totally, but far better than nothing. With the level of automated tracking of all kinds available these days, there simply cannot be any privacy unless there is a collective commitment to creating preserving such rights.

That's right, without an abstraction layer, the initialization code for openGL isn't even cross-platform compatible. That is wgl code (for windows). The glx equivalent code (for X11) is at least as bad. So, double the above, smoosh it all together with some #ifdef's for something resembling platform independence, and you're good to go!

Here is the code to draw 3 triangles in OpenGL without an abstraction library such as GLUT (which is very limiting). Have fun with that!

For that matter, I had to look down to about the 8th page of google hits for "opengl hello world" to find one that did NOT use an abstraction library. Which tells you how many people actually do that. So, "use openGL" isn't much help. How about, "try using openGL throgh wxWidgets" or somesuch. Nobody uses straight openGL.

OK... but this will be a task of the same magnitude of, say, writing GTK+. OpenGL by itself takes pages of code to open a graphics context or put a string of text on the screen. GLUI/GLUT is a weak joke. If he manages to write this over OpenGL, and it's any good, it will be the first time anybody has written a decent GUI library over OpenGL.

Perhaps their initial market is limited to biologists working on smaller genomes. But it did leave me wondering, if I just sneezed onto the thing, what would it sequence? There are millions of different microbes on and in each of us. Is there a way to target human DNA specifically? (Or nonhuman, e.g. "what strain of cold do I have?) Then, is there a way to sequence specific portions of a genome? (E.g. the portion(s) pertinent to Alzheimer's)?

Nobody ever said soybean was as good as steak, yet it's widely used as a meat filler/substitute. Drive the cost down and people will buy it. I'm rich by global standards but I still eat steak less often than hamburger, even though I consider it low-quality meat that has to be pre-chewed by a machine. And people buy lots of sausage that stretches the definition of "meat."

It doesn't matter too much which problem researchers focus on - they are solving the problem of human (and then superhuman) capabilities in this area. Captcha's are nice because you have a self-funding opponent creating test data for you.

It sounds like you've decided to step away from trying to help the company improve its process, for example by telling them when they are giving you directions that ruin efficiency. Is that because it's simply "not your problem," or because you tried being constructive in the past and got consistently bad outcomes from it?

Especially now as doctor's "margins" are getting thinner due to Medicare cutbacks and such, I'm sure this trend will continue. New tech costs money, and medical tech, even on the administration end, is ridiculously expensive.

I think the opposite: private practices are being driven out of business by large hospitals that work closely with insurers (including digital records), and more doctors are becoming employees instead of small business owners. In other words, price pressure is asserting itself and forcing consolidation, like with every other industry. Good or bad? I'm not entirely sure. We certainly do need to cut costs. There won't be many mom-and-pop shops that refuse to move to computer records any more.